Harry Potter Hullaballoo - The Worst Birthday

The Worst Birthday

In which Harry finds himself back at the Dursleys for the summer and turns twelve, the Dursleys host a dinner party to which Harry is not invited, and someone watches Harry from the bushes—but only in a minutely creepy way.

I hadn't realized how long it had been since I last read the Chamber of Secrets until I opened the book to find Vernon saying, "do I look stupid?" (1) and my own fourth-grade handwriting writing yes next to it, luckily in pencil.

It's July 31st when our story begins, Harry's birthday. This goes either unnoticed or ignored by the Dursleys who are much too concerned with their fancy dinner party to pay attention to Harry. It seems ridiculous, but I find the wizarding world to be much more believable than the "real" muggle world at this point. Characters in the wizarding world are real, extremely realistic people, and the Dursleys are not. Aunt Petunia is the ugly stepmother when she gives Harry only two slices of bread and cheese for dinner but prepares a feast for her dinner party. Uncle Vernon is just cruel for locking Harry in his room for no good reason. The most realistic person of the bunch is Dudley, and that remains true throughout the whole series. I almost feel bad for him, because his parents are so awful. Something of note: in this chapter, Dudley is the only one to acknowledge Harry's birthday.

No matter how cruel the Dursleys are, there is one thing restraining them and that is their fear of magic. It's not so coincidental that the Dursleys won't say "magic" and wizards won't say "Voldemort." It's especially apparent in this chapter. Vernon won't let Harry even write to his friends. Dudley is petrified of Harry. I think it was Aunt Petunia, who has been exposed to and knows most about magic, who instilled this fear in the other two Dursleys. That and Dudley with a pig's tail couldn't have helped. Aunt Petunia is an extremely interesting character that many people overlook and write off, and I think she has one of the most unique perspectives in the whole book, being a muggle who was exposed to magic and being so against it.

There's something very very sad about Harry not receiving letters from his friends. Hedwig is one of Harry's best friends. Even though he might take her for granted sometimes, she's his only link to the wizarding world during the summer months and the only friend he has at 4 Privet Drive. She's also the only friend who can honestly say she's been by his side from the beginning to the end.

Review // Cinder

Cinder

by Marissa Meyer

When I was a little girl not even in kindergarten yet, I watched Cinderella 10,000 times. I dressed up like her at least three Halloweens in a row, and as a four-year-old my first choice in career when I grew up was Cinderella, even though I would probably die doing all of those chores and definitely die if I saw a mouse, even if that mouse claimed to be my best friend Jaq. And now that we've established that I love me some Cinderella, let's talk about this fractured fairytale where Cinderella is a cyborg in the future.

So yeah, um, a girl named Cinder is a cyborg and a mechanic in a post-WWIV future. She lives in New Beijing, which I'm guessing is somewhere in Asia, probably close to where Beijing is currently (just a random guess though). New Beijing is the capital of the Eastern Commonwealth, a country that's a conglomeration of all of the east-y part of the world. Yes, so, Eastern Commonwealth is hit with a huge plague with a huge medical name, and this plague kills everyone who is infected with it, and there are some doctors who are trying to find a cure, but they aren't having any success. This plague comes from the moon, because there is a population of people on the moon, ruled by the evil Queen Levana, who are immune to the plague and are known as Lunars. There's also this Prince Kai guy who is looking for a wife, so he holds an annual ball, and he also kind of has a wee crush on Cinder after he takes his droid to her shop to get fixed. There's tension between the Lunars and the Earthlings. More concisely: Cinder, plague, Prince Kai (oh la la), Moon people, Evil Queen.

It was a fun read, for sure, and I mostly liked it. In terms of the actual plot of the book it was predictable but still very interesting and fresh. There was just something about reading it that I found a little jarring, a little less-than-absolutely-satisfying. I think it was the development of everything. It was a very full story, and pretty quick-paced, but I felt empty reading parts of it. Like, sort of emotionless at parts where I was supposed feel things. I certainly liked everything about the futuristic Earth, I just felt like certain aspects of the political situation between Earth and the Moon were breezed over too much to really be convinced by them. I think that's sometimes to downfall of science fiction or fantasy writing. There just aren't enough pages for it all to feel complete: something has to be compromised, whether it's the setting or the characters. Some authors do a great job of playing that balancing game, but I just wasn't convinced with Cinder.

I thought some parts were missing, but the things that were there were all good. The twist at the end was really excellent, although I did kind of guess it a third of the way through. Apparently Cinder is a part of a four-part series in which each book is based on a different fairytale. I'll definitely be picking up the other books when they come out.

❃ ❃ ❃ - 3/5

Review // Why We Broke Up

Why We Broke Up

by Daniel Handler

If you know Daniel Handler better as Lemony Snicket you will automatically know that this story is not going to be your run-of-the-mill break up story. And if you know neither Daniel Handler nor Lemony Snicket, then you're in for some quirky twists and turns along the way.

The premise of the book is a very simple something that we've all heard before: a girl returns some mementos to her ex-boyfriend and writes him a letter about why they broke up. The letter includes everything they did when they were together until they broke up. It's a story everyone's heard a million times over, but everyone's break up story is different.

Min and Ed are the two main characters. I really liked that their names, and all of the names in the story really, were very generic, short names, which kind of pounded in the notion that this breakup thing has or will happen to everyone at some point. This same story. I also thought it was clever that the story really could have happened at any point in time. Except for some midnight phone calls, there really wasn't anything that suggested that it had to be about 2012. Because again, this story could have been about anyone at any time. I personally imagined a mid-90s letter-jacket wearing Ed.

Min. She's awesome. In terms of uniqueness, she's very. She's the kind of person that people call arty, different—watches old films, drinks coffee, throws bittersweet sixteen parties. She's normal though. She's not artsy fartsy and she strives for many of the same goals as everyone else in the book. I kind of like the theme that if everyone is trying really hard to be different then they're all acting the same (hipsters). I liked her point of view and that, though she was new to dating and love and though she was writing an angry letter to her ex, she didn't seem desperate or whiny or any of the annoying post-breakup things a person could be.

I didn't like Ed. I know he's the ex-boyfriend, and if we're reading Min's side of things we're supposed to think he's a douchebagidiotassholesonofabitch, but he was very blurry and not very developed. I think there should have been some more colorful language used to express him as expressed above. Instead he was just kind of there to play the role of the not-so-observentcaringkind basketball boyfriend. I didn't really see the connection the two had to begin with . Min said over and over that she loved him, but I didn't see why. I couldn't find why they got together in the first place.

But if everything in this story is generic what makes this story different? It's the almost satirical way the story is laid out that I liked best—there was the generic break up story, the times when I thought oh, Min, don't do that, and the ending that you could do nothing but expect. It was the kind of story where you could see everything coming (I mean, it's called Why We Broke Up, you can't say you didn't see it coming), yet nothing seemed clichéd at all. It was like Min was having the last laugh. Like she's sitting with a beer at a barbecue ten years later with her hotter-than-hot husband and laughing with her awesomer-than-awesome friends and they're all telling the stories of the idiots they used to date in high school that ended up working behind the register at the Chicken Lickin' Diner.

Yes, liked. Yes, will reread at some point in the future. Yes, book did weigh more than my tiny guppy fish muscles could muster.

☕ ☕ ☕ ☕ - 4/5

Review // The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Stephen Chbosky

I guess that the best way to describe this book would be to say that it is a conglomeration of every life-changing thing that could ever potentially happen to someone in high school. It's an epistolary (ha, vocab word) novel written from sixteen-year-old Charlie's perspective to an unknown friend.

The book doesn't have problem/solution/beginning/middle/end plot, but it's not like it's supposed to. The story follows the path of the school year. Charlie recounts what happens to him on a day to day basis as he tries not to be a wallflower. "Participate" is the word Patrick always tells him.

Charlie's a really naïve fifteen-year-old, to the extent that at some points he seemed more like a sixth grader than a high school freshman. But at the same time that I say I can't believe all freshman are that innocent, there's something about Craig that makes you like him a lot. Like a Holden Caulfield or a John Green protagonist, Charlie is acutely observant and has thoughts that are well beyond his years and the way that he observes things just a little bit differently than everyone else does is what makes him such a great character. Something that makes me love any character is the way he or she notices tiny details about the world and people that others might miss. Despite Charlie's nerdy, somewhat socially awkward self, he's a very lovable guy, although the amount of crying he did over the course of one school year was pretty ridiculous.

Also lovable are his two best friends: stepbrother and stepsister team, Sam and Patrick. Sam and Patrick are like Janice and Damien from Mean Girls. In other words, "the greatest people you will ever meet." They cuddle Charlie under their motherly wing and teach him life lessons and stuff. I like that they're brother and sister, I thought that was pretty unique, and I loved their quirkiness. Where some secondary characters sometimes blend into the background and are just there for the sake of being there, Sam and Patrick are developed superbly and are as much a part of Charlie's life as Charlie is himself.

I had very mixed feelings about the end. It was extremely abrupt, and the denouement of the end of the school year happened, I thought, before the climax, which I'm not going to spoil. The climax was extremely shocking, and it fit with the story and explained why Charlie acted the way he did and why he thought in some of the ways that he thought. It explained a lot about his personality. But I hated the way they portrayed Sam.

-spoilers start here-

And this next part will be really spoilery, so scat if you've not read, but I really didn't want Sam and Charlie to be anything more than friends who just kissed the one time. And that's something that I don't like about stories: how a guy and a girl can never just be friends, they always have to like-like each other. I understood Sam's whole speech pre-kissing, but mleurghle, I just didn't like that scene. But minus the Sam + Charlie + Kissing + More scene,

-spoilers end here-

I thought the book was very energetic. It was able to deal with such a wide variety of topics, some subtle ones and some that were very outright (pg. 2, suicide), yet it didn't read like a soap opera or a reality TV show. And I loved it, and I recommend you pick it up. If you hate it, it's only 200 pages of your life wasted, and if you like it, there's a movie coming out later this year in which Emma Watson plays Sam. Eep!

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ - 5/5

Review // The Name of the Star

The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

So, in the book, there's this girl and her name is Rory. She's from Louisiana, but she's moving to London to go to boarding school there and also because studies show that the masses love English boarding schools (did you not read Harry Potter?). And, like, when she gets there she finds that a series of murders have occurred across the country, much the same way they did in 1888, when Jack the Ripper was around. Soon everyone is seized with fear and no answers and Rory finds herself in the spotlight when she is the only one that seems to have seen the person who police believe was the culprit. Oh, and there are ghosts.

As good as this book looked in the bookstore, I didn't actually find myself loving its innards. I don't want to cast Maureen Johnson off as one of those writers whose books I will never pick up again, but I tend to feel indifferent after reading her stuff.

It's not that there's anything wrong with The Name of the Star. The plot was good. The boarding school was good. The characters were good. I never feel particularly attached to Maureen Johnson's characters, and I don't feel like she really develops them to their fullest, but they were fine. I didn't like Jerome, who was set up to be such a cool guy and then ended up just being obsessed with the Ripper the whole time. But good is one of those throw away adjectives that means nothing.

The book was not scary. I don't read a ton of paranormal young adult books*, so I don't know if they're usually scary or not, but this wasn't at all.

I think that it's often really easy to only focus on the things I didn't like about the book, but there were things I loved about it, too. I don't want to make it sound like I thought this book was terrible, which it wasn't. For example, I love the way Maureen Johnson can set up a scene. When Rory first arrives to the boarding school and is taking in everything, I could really see the things that she described. I also love the little details she injects into her writing, like how Rory notices how her friend Jazza uses "who" and "whom" correctly. I also enjoyed Maureen's take on the ghost, twisting it beyond a Casper and into something that was realistic.

I liked the book, didn't love it, probably wouldn't be the first thing I'd recommend to you. I feel like this was a terribly generic review. Oh well.

✶ ✶ ✶ - 3/5

*Let me tell you, my local Barnes and Noble has an entire two shelves devoted to "Teen Paranormal Romance." Why, when there are only eight shelves of young adult in general, are two of them consumed with "Teen Paranormal Romance"? It aggravates me.

An Open Letter To Inventors

Dearest Inventors,

Let's play a game. It's called the annual weekly bathroom cleaning shindig. I'm no stranger when it comes to bathroom washing. Remove all empty bottles, put everything else on a shelf or in a cabinet, pour some Pine Sol in the toilet, scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, flush, OXYCLEAN the bathtub, get suffocated because the smell of OXYCLEAN is as strong as Billy Mays's voice is exuberant, get out some Clorox disinfecting wipes, scrub, scrub, scrub, take out the trash, on the way inside from taking out the trash grab mop, scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, slip on newly scrubbed floor, wipe off mirror, put fresh towels in bathroom, and relax. And I can finish my annual weekly bathroom cleaning shindig in fewer than twenty minutes (unless an OXYCLEAN-induced coughing fit overcomes me).

Every week, I get so frustrated when I find that the stupid little Clorox disinfecting wipes do not comma EVER comma clean up my hair. Being a girl with not long but long enough hair means that if I lose any hair at all, it will end up in one of two places: the bathroom sink or the shower. It really hinders my ability to clean, especially when Clorox wipes don't do their job of wiping up my hairs.

The proposal: a little brush, a spray, or a wipe that I can brush/spray/wipe before I disinfect that will remove my hair from the bathroom sink/shower. I know this is a worldwide problem, not just my own, and I think that the product could be a bestseller (just like the As Seen on TV meatloaf pan). That is all.

In hopes that future bathrooms will be hair free,
Sammie, Girl with Hair